Posts Tagged ‘suicide’
Committed Suicide or Died by Suicide?
Friday, March 22nd, 2013
Guest blog by Linda Woods
When I hear the phrase committed suicide I cringe at those words. It always sounds to me like someone has committed a crime. Not so many years ago in Canada it was a criminal offence to take your own life. In some states in the U.S. it is still a crime. I have met parents who have been shattered by the death of their child by suicide and to add insult to injury their dead child was charged with a criminal offence after their death.
Our 13-year-old son Greg died by suicide on January 25, 1990, so I have had a lot of time to come to terms with and educate myself around the subject of suicide. When a person has depression or a mental illness and it is not treated they sometimes go on to died by suicide. They were in horrific indescribable pain and suffered beyond our comprehension and now we want to persecute them further by suggesting that they are committing a crime. Suicide is not about dying; it is about ending the pain.
Tags: death by suicide, Linda Woods, suicide
Posted in Tutorials About Bullying, WBI Education | No Archived Comments | Post A Comment (
Unintentional subway suicide & death victims – traumatized train operators
Friday, January 4th, 2013
“12-9″ is the New York City subway transit code for a passenger under a train. In 2012 55 people died by subway impact. When the death is a deliberate suicide, there are at least two victims — the person committing suicide wishing to die and the train operator dragged into the plan involuntarily. For operators, they are at work on the job.
Equally horrific is the recent spate of deliberate murders committed by crazed individuals who push others onto the tracks in front of a subway train that cannot stop in time to prevent death or injury.
The sensitive New York Times report about the plight of train operators caught my attention.
Historians of the workplace bullying movement recognize the phenomenon that first interested Heinz Leymann, the international founder. The suicides caused the trauma from work that led to his work on mobbing. The best source of information about Leymann is written and maintained by Prof. Ken Westhues at the University of Waterloo.
Leymann researched mobbing in Sweden. Follow the links at the above website (Essential Article to read one of Leymann’s earliest English-language articles.) Mobbing always has several perpetrators and a single victim. Some argue that workplace bullying is different. At WBI we believe they are the same thing. In bullying, accomplices line up to aid and abet the single instigator leading to a “ganging up” as in mobbing.
Tags: subway train operators, suicide, vicarious trauma
Posted in Bullying & Health, WBI Education | No Archived Comments | Post A Comment (
Workplace bullying drives Annette Prada, NM gov’t worker, to suicide
Monday, December 3rd, 2012
If exposed long enough to severe workplace bullying, two outcomes become likely. First, the target’s health is jeopardized. Second, unremitting stress can cause loss of the ability to discern and make choices to get oneself to safety due to physiological changes in the brain. The second outcome can lead to suicide. One WBI 2012 study found that 29% of bullied targets considered suicide; 16% actually had a plan to execute.
Annette Prada worked 23 years for a New Mexico state agency, the Public Regulation Commission (PRC) in the Corporations bureau. Her daughter told The New Mexican reporter Staci Matlock that her mother had been dealing with “bullying and stress there for years.” Andre Prada claimed the abuse was verbal, in e-mails and in the form of demotions.
Annette’s daughter repeated the phrase we too often hear here at WBI, that her mother was “only two years away from retirement. She tried to stay strong.” The family confirmed that Annette also had health problems.
Annette disappeared on Thursday Nov. 29. Police told her family that she was found dead.
Tags: Annette Prada, Johnny Montoya, Mercie Roybal, NM Public Regulations Commission, Patrick Lyons, Staci Matlock, Stacy Marie Starr-Garcia, suicide, workplace bullying
Posted in Media About Bullying, Print: News, Blogs, Magazines, WBI Education, WBI Surveys & Studies | No Archived Comments | Post A Comment (
Work Bully Victims Struggle with Dangerous Stress
Thursday, January 12th, 2012
Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience, January 12, 2012
If you spend your workday avoiding an abusive boss, tiptoeing around co-workers who talk behind your back, or eating lunch alone because you’ve been ostracized from your cubicle mates, you may be the victim of workplace bullying. New research suggests that you’re not alone, especially if you’re struggling to cope.
Tags: Gary Namie, health harm, PTSD, Stephanie Pappas, stress, suicide, workplace bullying
Posted in Fairness & Social Justice Denied, WBI in the News | 23 Archived Comments | Post A Comment (
A Federal Anti-Bullying Bill Coming
Friday, October 8th, 2010
One of the two U.S. Senators from New Jersey, Frank Lautenberg (D), has promised to act on the Tyler Clementi suicide at Rutgers University. He will introduce a bill in November requiring colleges and universities that receive federal student aid to adopt a code of conduct that prohibits bullying and harassment of students, and to have in place a policy to deal with complaints and incidents of harassment. The schools would be required to recognize cyberbullying as a form of harassment. The bill would also provide funding for schools to establish programs to deter harassment of students, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) college students. You can read his announcement. This response will be met with predictable hand wringing by bully apologists and those who denigrate people driven to suicide (Bazelon at Slate, Newsweek, et al.). The truth is that without a push for doing the right thing via threat of litigation, good people die while waiting for voluntary institutional action that never comes.
Tags: Clementi, Lautenberg, Rutgers University, suicide
Posted in Healthy Workplace Bill (U.S. campaign) | 4 Archived Comments | Post A Comment (
Empathy, integrity, torture led to Army suicide
Wednesday, September 15th, 2010
Alyssa Peterson
Sept. 15, 2010 marks the 7th anniversary of Alyssa Peterson’s death in Iraq.
Alyssa Peterson, 27, a Flagstaff Arizona native served in a military intelligence unit of the 101st Airborne in Iraq in 2003. She formally and loudly objected to techniques used against prisoners (which we have all since learned were torture). She was trained in Arabic and interrogation techniques. She was a Mormon who, prior to deployment, reportedly was questioning her faith. Her family and fellow trainees remembered her as extremely empathetic and kind.
Tags: Alyssa Peterson, Army, Greg Mitchell, Kevin Elston, military intelligence, suicide, torture
Posted in Employers Gone Wild: Doing Bad Things, Fairness & Social Justice Denied | 1 Archived Comment | Post A Comment (
Journalism ethics professor trivializes Univ of Virginia story
Wednesday, September 1st, 2010
Ed Wasserman was a reporter and is now a professor of journalism ethics at Washington & Lee University. He opined in his Aug. 29 newspaper column on the media about the Kevin Morrissey suicide story at the University of Virginia that would not have been a story without the “tilt of coverage toward this hot new social malady” (thanks for the back-handed compliment about awareness about workplace bullying).
Tags: Edward Wasserman, Kevin Morrissey, suicide, Ted Genoways, University of Virginia, Virginia Quarterly Review, VQR, Washington & Lee, workplace bullying
Posted in Employers Gone Wild: Doing Bad Things | 4 Archived Comments | Post A Comment (
Kevin Morrissey suicide update
Friday, August 20th, 2010
The most detailed account of events at the University of Virginia that led up to Kevin Morrissey’s suicide can be found in the Charlottesville newspaper, The Hook:
Tale of Woe: The death of Kevin Morrissey by Dave McNair, August 18, 2010
Take time to read the several comments, including mine.
Tags: Casteen, Kevin Morrissey, Maria Morrissey, suicide, Sullivan, Ted Genoways, University of Virginia, Virginia Quarterly Review, VQR, workplace bullying
Posted in Employers Gone Wild: Doing Bad Things, WBI in the News | 1 Archived Comment | Post A Comment (
University suicide points to nonreponsive employer
Sunday, August 15th, 2010
Ted Genoways, VQR editor accused of bullying by suicide victim
At universities, people tend to think of teaching and research faculty and staff as the only employees. At the University of Virginia, the president supports a literary journal, the Virginia Quarterly Review, prestigious to poets and fiction writers. Kevin Morrissey, 52, the VQR managing editor had been hired by a young Ted Genoways, 38, new himself to the editor post in 2003.
On July 30, Kevin Morrissey committed suicide after a reported three years of torment by Genoways despite the two having a genuine friendship at the start of their work together.
There was a record of several calls by Morrissey to university institutional helpers (HR, ombuds, EAP, president’s office). Either his call for help was not answered or treated with indifference. Those familiar with Morrissey’s complaints said that the rationalization for Genoways was that creative people like him could be difficult to work with and were often bad managers! In other words, live with him, adjust to him, Genoways is indispensable. Note the abdication of responsibility by this employer for the safe working conditions of its employees.
Tags: bullycide, John Casteen, Kevin Morrissey, suicide, Ted Genoways, University of Virginia, Virginia Quarterly Review, workplace bullying
Posted in Employers Gone Wild: Doing Bad Things, Fairness & Social Justice Denied | 24 Archived Comments | Post A Comment (
Economic Distress Prompts Suicide Call Increase
Friday, August 7th, 2009
The federal government through the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA, part of HHS) is funding an additional $1 million for 20 suicide prevention crisis centers dealing with significantly more calls from people in economic distress (about 25% of the 57,000 calls in July). The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, which routes calls to about 140 crisis centers across the country, is
1-800-273-TALK / 1-800-273-8255
Tags: economic crisis, National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, SAMHSA, suicide
Posted in Bullying & Health, Bullying-Related Research | 3 Archived Comments | Post A Comment (
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